The field of automatically summarizing text consisting of a collection of sentences has been studied for over forty years. However, automatic text summarization has received greater attention recently because of its pervasive use in present information retrieval systems. One type of text summarization method consists of extracting a number of sentences from the text that convey the essential points of the text. The number of sentences extracted from a text may be few to present only enough information to allow a user to determine whether or not to read the entire text or many to act as a substitute for the text.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,384,703, entitled “METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR SUMMARIZING DOCUMENTS ACCORDING TO THEME,” discloses a device for and method of summarizing a document that includes the step of selecting regions in the document based on the occurrence of two or more members from a seed list. The present invention does not use a seed list as in U.S. Pat. No. 5,384,703. U.S. Pat. No. 5,384,703 is hereby incorporated by reference into the specification of the present invention.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,638,543, entitled “METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR AUTOMATIC DOCUMENT SUMMARIZATION,” discloses a device for and method of summarizing a document that includes the step of scoring sentences based on the number of stop words and strings of connected stop words. The present invention does not score sentences based on the number of stop words and strings of stop words as in U.S. Pat. No. 5,638,543. U.S. Pat. No. 5,638,543 is hereby incorporated by reference into the specification of the present invention.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,924,108 and 6,349,316, each entitled “DOCUMENT SUMMARIZER FOR WORD PROCESSORS,” each disclose a method of summarizing a document that includes the step of scoring sentences by summing the frequency counts of content words in a sentence divided by the total number of content words in the sentence. The present invention does not score sentences as in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,924,108 and 6,349,316. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,924,108 and 6,349,316 are hereby incorporated by reference into the specification of the present invention.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,978,820, entitled “TEXT SUMMARIZING METHOD AND SYSTEM,” discloses a device for and method of summarizing a document that includes the step of determining a number of attributes of the text such as the number of characters, the number of paragraphs, a specific character string, the frequency of occurrence of opinion sentences, imperative sentences, polite sentences, conversational sentences, and colloquial sentences. The present invention does not determine attributes as in U.S. Pat. No. 5,978,820. U.S. Pat. No. 5,978,820 is hereby incorporated by reference into the specification of the present invention.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,205,456, entitled “SUMMARIZATION APPARATUS AND METHOD,” discloses a device for and method of summarizing a document that requires input from the user concerning the user's focus and knowledge. The present invention does not require input from the user concerning the user's focus and knowledge as in U.S. Pat. No. 6,205,456. U.S. Pat. No. 6,205,456 is hereby incorporated by reference into the specification of the present invention.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,289,304, entitled “TEXT SUMMARIZATION USING PART-OF-SPEECH,” discloses a method of summarizing text that includes the step of identifying the part-of-speech of each word in the text. The present invention does not identify the part-of-speech of each word in the text as in U.S. Pat. No. 6,289,304. U.S. Pat. No. 6,289,304 is hereby incorporated by reference into the specification of the present invention.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,338,034, entitled “METHOD, APPARATUS, AND COMPUTER PROGRAM PRODUCT FOR GENERATING A SUMMARY OF A DOCUMENT BASED ON COMMON EXPRESSIONS APPEARING IN THE DOCUMENT,” discloses a device for and method of summarizing a document that includes the step of looking up common expression information. The present invention does not use look up common expression information as in U.S. Pat. No. 6,338,034. U.S. Pat. No. 6,338,034 is hereby incorporated by reference into the specification of the present invention.